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Monday, April 1, 2013

New Dukes Stuff - 4/1/2013 - Different Versions of Dukes Items

My latest acquisitions of Dukes of Hazzard vestiges include items that are new to the assemblage, but I have similar versions of each specimen. Thank you thesaurus.com.

This beat up little Dukes book by Barbara Clayman has been read hundreds of times by students in South Ripley Elementary School in Versailles, Indiana. I have never seen this book before and it may only have been published for school libraries.

It was published by Creative Education. It must have been in the library systems recently enough to have been bar-coded.

The back cover includes the record of the book being checked out from 1984 to 1991. Google tells me that this is the only book by Barbara Clayman.

It includes stories and pictures about the show.

It is the same kind of book as Roger Elwood's Dukes of Hazzard Scrapbook.

This is a Dukes cereal bowl.

It only has the artwork on the inside, and the rest is plain white. It would be a lot of fun to eat a bowl of cereal from this not knowing what kind of bowl it was and to discover the General Lee once you finished, though that will never happen with this particular bowl.

It is similar to the standard Dukes bowl that we all have. This one is part of a set with a mug. I probably have five of those bowls in the collection.

There are several different Dukes toy guitars. They come in two shapes, the folk guitar and the electric guitar. I didn't have an electric version until now. This one is excellent shape and all of the stickers look great.

My original folk guitar was a staple of my childhood. I played with that thing all the time. You'd think I would be somewhat musically inclined because of it. I'm not. At all. When I got this new one, I was surprised by how much smaller it was than the folk version.

The guitars share the same artwork, though only the electric has the 01 sticker. There are different color variations to both guitars. I have both folk guitars which come in orange and white. With the addition of the white electric, I just need the black electric and I will have them all.

This is an odd item that I didn't know existed. It is the Ben Cooper Bo Duke costume, but it comes on a cardboard hanger rather that the standard box. I am guessing this was released after the the show's popularity declined. It seems like a discount version of the costume.

Somewhere along the way, it was offered for only fifty cents. It's funny to think about items like this that were sold at retail, resold at a huge discount, put away for years and years and then reresold on ebay for way more than original retail. The Ben Cooper logo is on the hang tag.

I thought I had all of the versions of this costume before I found this one. The super hero box is a generic Ben Cooper box that the costume came in first. They later released it in a franchise specific rebel flag box. Of course we all remember Bo wearing a shirt that had a sort of rebel flag, the words "The Dukes of Hazzard," and a picture of his car on it. He wore that all the time! It's strange that they did not release a Luke costume. The mask on the new one is a little flat and it looks more like He-Man than John Schneider.

This is an item I am very excited about, but no one seems to share my excitement. It is the Dukes movie on VHS. On December 6, 2005 when the movie was released on home video, I was at Wal-Mart at midnight. I bought every version they had. I bought the unrated DVD in widescreen and fullscreen, I bought the rated version in fullscreen (weird that it didn't come in widescreen), I bought the PSP UMD version, and I bought the HD-DVD version. I never owned a PSP rr an HD-DVD player, I just wanted every version of it. I'm still confused why it was never released on Blu-ray. But that day in Wal-Mart, there was no VHS version. DVD had taken over by then and I thought Warner Brothers bypassed the format for this release.

In the eight years since the movie came out (WOW it's been eight years!) I have never come across it in VHS. And believe me, I've looked. I happened across this copy on ebay for three bucks including shipping. I couldn't "buy it now" fast enough. The slip cover and tape are in great shape.

It is a rental from Hollywood Video. Maybe the VHS version was only released to rental places, but who was renting VHS in 2005? Netflix and the like really did kill the major video rental chains. Every once in a while you stumble across a Blockbuster and you get an eerie feeling like there is something really illegal going on in the back of that store. Why is it still open? I want to dig up a VCR so I can watch this tape. But I'll probably just watch the DVRed version that has been on my cable box since that last time HBO showed the movie. No you can't delete it, it's not taking up that much space!!